“What hurts the heart also hurts the brain”
By: Jean Johnson for Heart1
Losing one’s mental faculties just as wisdom is finally setting in surely is one of modern life’s great injustices. Said 84-year-old Bill Lawrence of Portland, Oregon who peered through large red-rimmed bifocals from the confines of his motorized wheel chair, “I may not be able to walk, but at least I can still listen to the State of the Union address and read and recognize who comes to see me.”
| Take Action |
Be Heart Healthy:
- Eat healthy
1. High fiber diet low in processed food and hydrogenated fats
2. Get omega-3 oil (canola-rapeseed, flax, fish)
3. Push a variety of fruit and vegetables
- Don’t’ smoke – at all
- Control the waist line – belly fat is not heart friendly
- Manage stress
1. Cardio workouts
2. Yoga
3. Meditation
4. Floating on a yellow raft in blue water
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The 6.8 million Americans currently suffering from dementia don’t enjoy Lawrence’s awareness. And with the number of cases expected to triple by mid-century, researchers throughout the modern world are scrambling to make more sense of the problem.
The estimated 20 percent of those who have Alzheimer’s may be affected by mixed dementia, a condition associated with blood flow to the brain, and one that seems to be affected by the same factors that influence heart health – smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and obesity. If current preliminary studies lead to more definitive conclusions, physicians will use more affordable medicines and treatments associated with cardiovascular disease to treat dementia instead of treating mixed dementia with expensive memory loss drugs.
In Stockholm scientists following patients over a 30-year period found that obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol in middle age predisposed elders 60 years and older for Alzheimer’s. Similarly, in Michigan, Seattle and Northern California recent studies revealed close association between hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, and smoking, and mixed dementia, which is a combination of Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia caused by problems with blood flow to the brain.
According to assistant professor of medicine and research investigator at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, Dr. Kenneth Langa, “Having risk factors like high blood pressure and high cholesterol does damage to small blood vessels in the brain and can cause death of brain cells over time.”
Lead researcher in a Northern California study sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, Rachel Whitmer, noted, “People used to think of the brain as this separate thing: There was the blood-brain barrier that nothing could cross. There’s been lots of work coming out in recent years, though, showing that what hurts the heart also hurts the brain.”
Fine tuning their results, scientists in various studies added that propensity for dementia tends to correlate with the number of risk factors patients have. Those with only one problem – like people who smoked at some point in their lives – were 27 percent as likely as those without any risk factors to get dementia at some point in their lives. Similarly, people with three factors or more were 2.3 times as likely to suffer dementia.
That said the problem of treating dementia can almost seem like that of a cat chasing its tail. According to Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, head of the Layton Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Oregon Health and Sciences University, since the main risk factor for Alzheimer’s is old age, treating risk factors for heart health could ultimately result in increased numbers of patients with dementia.
Staying fit then, buys people over 60 more potential quality time. Still, if Dr. Kaye is correct, at some point, all bets are off and nature simply insists on taking her course.
